Related articles

The Cheapside Hoard
; the Crown Jewels of Stonehenge and now
Beyond El Dorado at the British Museum
- there are enough jewellery exhibitions on to keep a glitter-loving girl happy for weeks. The latter untangles the myth of El Dorado, the legendary Colombian city of fabulous riches that legions of adventurers failed to find.

What's striking is how modern and, frankly, covetable the jewels in this show are. There's a fierce necklace of inch-long gold jaguar claws (you can buy a version of this, the Tairona bead claw necklace, £399, in the British Museum shop) and several highly stylised pieces, each a good 10cm long and cut from a single sheet of gold, in the shape of birds, bats and crocodiles. Rihanna could really pull off the Condor earrings.

Gold was thought to connect people with the natural world (with the help of a handful of coca leaves) and a lot of the jewellery on show is of trippy, part-human, part-animal creatures. There are diadems and nose ornaments inscribed with freaky faces and covered in dangling, jangling shapes that leave Lady Gaga's get-ups in the dust.

It's miraculous any of this survives. The conquistadors took every scrap of gold they could find, but some was buried in caves and under trees in rituals too obscure for them to know about.

They knew all about the ritual at Columbia's Lake Guatavita, though. Here, the Muisca people would strip their ruler naked, cover him in sticky earth and roll him in gold - he's your El Dorado, 'the golden one', a person, not a place, after all - before pushing him on a raft of rushes to the centre of the lake, where he'd throw offerings of gold and emeralds into the water. The Spanish drained the lake and took so much treasure they needed 6,000 donkeys to carry it.

Get the look: Luisa gold-tone crystal brooch, £1,110 by Lanvin at Net-A-Porter.com

The styles and techniques on show here have percolated through the centuries. Yossi Harari's hammered gold pear-shaped earrings (£4,025) at
Talisman Gallery
could have stepped out of the exhibition. You can also buy a
Lanvin bug brooch
(£1,110) on
net-a-porter.com
whose geometric design is directly descended from these pieces. A
1970s Chanel baroque cross necklace
(£845) on
atelier-mayer.com
shows how close the apples have fallen to the tree throughout the years. I've just bought a house, though, so I picked up a little gold-plated reproduction 'bird man' pendant in the
British Museum shop.
It was £3.99 - and it's had a ton of compliments.